The Cheese #67 🧀 - Six Hosts Cooking, Chicago, and a Network Pitch

The Cheese is Best Served Live (and Live is Cooking)

Whatnot is off to a strong start this month. We're on pace to destroy March, which feels wild to type because March was already a record. Pure byproduct of having 6 hosts on the schedule as of Monday. Alex and Jason both premiered their first shows this week, and Bishop's first show is today at 2 pm ET (you might be reading this as he's going live).

Lots of learning for Alex and Jason after their initial shows. The key with every new host is whether they take the learnings and actually apply them. We're seeing incremental improvements show over show, which is exactly what you want to see. If we don't, we identify it fast and course correct. Also had a call with Whatnot's product team yesterday, and I'm super excited about some of the stuff they're working on. Can't get into specifics, but it lines up nicely with where we're trying to take this channel.

eBay Live is a different story. We've hit some real hurdles on the Shopify integration and the underlying tech. Honestly, a little surprised to be running into stuff like this. eBay is a long-established company, but LIVE selling is relatively new for them, and it sounds like most of their early testing has been with less technically advanced merchants. We'll get there, just slower than I thought.

As you're reading this, I'm in Chicago. Colleen, Johnny, and I are doing the tourist thing today. Tomorrow morning is Amer and Eleni's baby shower, then we're on a flight home Saturday evening. Home for Mother's Day and Monday, then the whole family is headed to Kansas City for SubSummit. SubSummit is one of my favorite conferences of the year, and we've got 8 BattlBoxers attending (including me). Going to be a great few days.

Big BattlGames update: we had our first "pitch" call with a network yesterday. Call went really well. There were way more paths to go down than I expected, which is a good problem to have. Their next step is sending an email outlining all the ways they envision us potentially working together. One down, a couple more to go. Can't say much yet, but I'll keep you posted as it progresses.

Amazon doesn't have a huge update this week. We saw a slight slowdown in some of our hero products, and we're trying to figure out what caused it. Likely culprit is a die-down in the success of our organic content around those products, which gives a nice halo to Amazon sales. Membership month ended 5/3, and we landed in a respectable spot like I expected. Still some room for improvement, but no fires.

AI was a little quieter this week. Other parts of the business needed more attention, and I just couldn't carve out the time block I wanted for the PDP automation build. That's priority 1, the second I'm back from SubSummit. Did get two AI wins in though. Shay and I used a Claude skill to penetration test the final BattlGames events (not sure if that's the right word, but basically had it find gaps and issues that could bite us later), and now all the events are baked in time for our site visit when I'm back. Then on Sunday, I built an automation for my Whatnot commissions exercise. That used to take about an hour every 2 weeks. Now I hit RUN, and it's done in 5 minutes, including the calculations, the Slack messages to each recipient, and the total-to-pay message to Ben. The kicker is it took me almost 3 hours to build, so I'll get my ROI on it sometime in July lol.

Let's get into the rest!

RIP Parker

Andrei dropped a sharp post this week about Parker quietly being gone. We never used Parker, but they did take me to drive Lambos in Vegas one time, so I'll always have that. The fact that nobody really got a heads-up is the part worth thinking about.

Sunday is for fire memes

Posted this one on Sunday. Sometimes you just have to drop the meme.

Diane Hendricks built a billion-dollar empire

Lhea wrote up the story of Diane Hendricks turning ABC Supply into the biggest roofing distributor in the country. Wild build from scratch. Worth a read if you're into operator stories.

What your C-suite actually needs to know about Google Ads

Solid piece on what the executive team actually cares about (and what they don't) when it comes to Google Ads reporting. If you've ever sat in a meeting trying to translate your media plan into something the CFO understands, this is the read.

BattlGames Season 3 sponsorships

Quick CTA. We're filming BattlGames Season 3 in Athens, GA in September. We've still got a few sponsorship spots available. If you're interested or want to know more, just reply to this email, and we'll get you the deck.

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The Cheese is Served, and It’s Time to Share the Fun! 🧀

If you enjoyed this week’s cheesy goodness, why not share the love? Forward this newsletter to someone who could use a little extra cheese in their day.

Stay cheesy, and we’ll catch you next week with more!

Queso-Love,
Team Online Queso